The Contemporary World 2020

UNIT IV THE WORLD OF IDEAS

Coverage: Weeks 10 and 11

Duration: 6 hours

The Global Media Cultures (3 hours; week 10)

The Globalization of Religion (3 hours; week 11)

Learning Objectives: After studying the unit, the students should be able to:

 Explain the dynamics between local and global cultural production

 Explain how globalization affects religious practices and beliefs

1. The Global Media Cultures

2. The Globalization of Religion

The Global Media Cultures

Globalization and identity, globalization and human rights, globalization and
culture, or globalization and terrorism are some concepts related to the study of
globalization by many scholars. Among these concepts, the one that offers special
insights is globalization and media. They are partners and act as a unit. Situations
created through globalization and media make people conceive they belong to one
world called global village, a term coined by Marshall MacLuhan in early 1960’s, a
Canadian media theorist, to express the idea that people throughout the world are
interconnected through the use of new media technologies (143).
According to scholars, the world is globalized in the 1900s upon the
advancement of media and transportation technology. Changes in migration patterns
where people move easily and advancement in media which brought changes to human
life heightens globalization. As a process, globalization worked silently for millennia
without having been given a name; as a trend it had been with us since the beginning of
history and further argued that a multitude of threads connect us faraway places from
an ancient time (144).

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Globalization and Media

Globalization which refers to economic and political integration on a world scale,
has a crucial cultural dimension in which the media has the central role. Global
institution like the media has an impact upon the structures and processes of the
nation‐state, including its national culture. In that sense, media globalization is about
how most national media systems have become more internationalized, becoming more
open to outside influences, both in their content and in their ownership and control (145).

Five Time Periods in the Study of Globalization and Media

1. Oral Communication
Globalization as a social process is characterized by the existence of global
economic, political, cultural, linguistic and environmental interconnections and flows that
make the many of the currently existing borders and boundaries irrelevant.
Of all forms of media, human speech is the oldest and most enduring. Humans
are allowed to cooperate and communicate through language. Human ability to move
from one place to another and to adapt to a new and different environment are
facilitated by the sharing of information of other peoples (146). Languages as a means to
develop the ability to communicate across culture are the lifeline of globalization.
Without language there would be no globalization; and vice versa, without globalization
there would be no world languages (147).

2. Script
Writing is humankind’s principal technology for collecting, manipulating, storing,
retrieving, communicating and disseminating information. Writing may have been
invented independently three times in different parts of the world: in the Near East,
China and Mesoamerica. Writing is a system of graphic marks representing the units of
a specific language. Cuneiform script created in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, is the
only writing system which can be traced to its earliest prehistoric origin.

This antecedent of the cuneiform script was a system of counting and recording goods
with clay tokens. The evolution of writing from tokens to pictography, syllabary and
alphabet illustrates the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts
of data in ever greater abstraction (148).
Humans communicate and shared knowledge and ideas through script- the very first
writing. The origin of writing was in the form of carvings such as wood, stone, bones and
others. The medium that drove humans to globalization was the script of Ancient Egyptian
written in papyrus (plant). Written and orderly arrangement of documents pertaining to
religious, cultural, economic and religious practices are done through script for
dissemination to other places. These can also be handed down from generation to

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generation. Script is an important tool for globalization as it considers the integration of

economy, politics and culture to the world. The great civilization from Egypt to Rome and
China were made possible through script (149).

3. The Printing Press

The printing press is a device that allows for the mass production of
uniform printed matter, mainly text in the form of books, pamphlets and
newspapers (150) . It revolutionized society in China where it was created.
Johannes Gutenberg further developed this in the 15 th century with his invention
of the Gutenberg press.

The following are the consequences of the printing press (151)

:

1. The printing press changed the very nature of knowledge. It preserved

knowledge which had been more malleable in oral cultures. It also
standardized knowledge.

2. Print encouraged the challenge of political and religious authority

because of its ability to circulate competing views. Printing press
encouraged the literacy of the public and the growth of schools.

Lands and culture were learned by people through travels. News

around the world were brought through inexpensive and easily obtained
magazines and daily newspapers. People learned about the world.
Indeed, printing press helped foster globalization and knowledge of
globalization.

4. Electronic Media

It refers to the broadcast or storage media that take advantage of electronic

technology. They may include television, radio, internet, fax, CD-ROMs, DVD, and
any other medium that requires electricity or digital encoding of information. The
term electronic media is often used in contrast with print media (152) .

On going globalization processes such as economic, political, and cultural

are revolutionized by a host of new media in the beginning of the 19th century.
These electronic media in the likes of telegraph, telephone, radio, film, and
television continously open up new perspectives of globalization. In the 20th
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century, the only available mass media in remote villages was the radio while film
was soon developed as an artistic medium for great cultural expression. The most
powerful and pervasive mass media is television as it brought the visual and aural
power of film with the accessibility of radio. The introduction of television was a
defining moment in globalization (153) . Thus,the world is proclaimed a global
village because of television (154) .

5.Digital Media

Phones and television are now considered digital while computer is

considered the most important media influencing globalization. Computers
give access to global and market place and transformed cultural life. The
following are the companies involved in globalization: Microsoft, Apple, Google,
and Facebook.

Our daily life is revolutionized by digital media. People are able to adopt
and adapt new parctices like fashion, sports, music, food and many others
through access of information provided by computers. They also exchange ideas,
establish relations and linkages through the use of skype, google, chat, and zoom.

Popular Music and Globalization

Music participates in the reinforcing of boundaries of culture and identity.

Popular music explains the complex dynamics of globalization not only because it
is popular but music is highly mediated, is deeply invested in meaning and has
proven to be an extremely mobile and resourceful capital (155) .

World music is defined as the umbrella category which various types of

traditional and non Western music are produced for Western consumption (156 ). It
is a label of industrial origin that refers to an amalgamated global marketplace of
sounds as ethnic commodities (157) . Globalization is not something that happen to
music or has a certain impact on it. Changes in musical culture constitute one of
the aspects of globalization, and they concern institutions, system of value, and
social groups involved in musical life (158 ). The change in popular music is not the
outcome of globalization but rather popular music industry is a part of
globalization phenomena (159) .

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The Globalization of Religion

Globalization implicates religions in several ways. It calls forth religious response

and interpretation. Religions played important roles in bringing about and characterizing
globalization. Among the consequences of this implication for religion is that
globalization encourages religious pluralism. Religions identify themselves in relation to
one another, and they become less rooted in particular places because of diasporas
and transnational ties. Globalization further provides fertile ground for a variety of
noninstitutionalized religious manifestations and for the development of religion as a
political and cultural resource (160).

Perspectives on the Role of Religion in the Globalization Process (161)

1. The Modernist Perspective.

It is the perspective of most intellectuals and academics.Its view is that all

secularizations would eventually look alike and the different religions would all end up
as the same secular and “rational” philosophy. It sees religion revivals as sometimes
being a reaction to the Enlightenment and modernization.

2. Post-Modernist Perspective.

It rejects the Enlightenment, modernist values of rationalism, empiricism, and

science, along with the Enlightenment, modernist structures of capitalism, bureaucracy,
and even liberalism. The core value of post-modernism is expressive individualism. The
post-modernist perspective can include “spiritual experiences,” but only those without
religious constraints. Post-modernism is largely hyper- secularism, and it joins
modernism in predicting, and eagerly anticipating, the disappearance of traditional
religions. Globalization, by breaking up and dissolving every traditional, local, and
national structure, will bring about the universal triumph of expressive individualism.

3. The Pre-Modernist Perspective.

There is an alternative perspective, one which is post-modern in its occurrence

but which is pre-modern in its sensibility. It is best represented and articulated by the
Roman Catholic Church, especially by Pope John Paul II. The Pope’s understanding is
drawn from his experiences with Poland, but it encompasses events in other countries
as well. Each religion has secularized in its own distinctive way, which has resulted in its
own distinctive secular outcome. This suggests that even if globalization brings about
more secularization, it will not soon bring about one common, global worldview.

Secularization is understood as a shift in the overall frameworks of human

condition; it makes it possible for people to have a choice between belief and non belief
in a manner hitherto unknown (162 ).

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Transnational Religion and Multiple Glocalization

Throughout the 20th century migration of faiths across the globe has been a
major feature. One of these features is the deterritorialization of religion – that is , the
appearance and the efflorescence of religious traditions in places where these
previously had been largely unknown or were at least in a minority position (163).

Transnational religion is a means of describing solutions to new-found situations

that people face as a result of migration and it comes as two quite distinct blends of
religious universalism and local particularism.

1. It is possible for religious universalism to gain the upperhand, whereby

universalism becomes the central reference for immigrant communities. In
such instances, religious transnationalism is often depicted as a religion
going global.

2. It is possible for local ethnic or national particularism to gain or maintain

the most important place for local immigrant communities.

In such instances, transnational national communities are constructed and

religious hierarchies perform dual religious and secular functions that ensure the
groups’ survival (164). Fundamentalist or revivalist movement attempt to construct pure
religion that sheds the cultural tradition in which past religious life was immersed (165).

Transnational religion is used to describe cases of institutional transnationalism

whereby communities living outside the national territory of particular states maintain
religious attachments to their home churches or institutional (166).

Indigenization, hybridization or glocalization are processes that register the ability

of religion to mould into the fabric of different communities in ways that connect it
intimately with communal and local relations (167). Global -local or glocal religion
represents a genre of expression, communication and individual identities (168). It
involves the consideration of an entire range of responses as outcomes instead of a
single master narrative of secularization and modernization (169).

Forms of Glocalization

1. indigenization

2. vernacularization

3. nationalization

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4. transnationalization

Indigenization is connected with the specific faiths with ethnic groups whereby
religion and culture were often fused into a single unit. It is also connected to the
survival of particular ethnic groups. Vernacularization involved the rise of vernacular
language endowed with the symbolic ability of offering privileged access to the sacred
and often promoted by empires (170).

Nationalization connected the consolidation of specific nations with particular

confessions and has been a popular strategy both in Western and eastern Europe (171).
Transnationalization complemented religious nationalization by forcing groups to
identify with specific religious traditions of real or imagine national homelands or to
adopt a more universalist vision of religion (172).

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